Recipe: Tarta de Santiago

The easiest gluten free cake I know

I’m cooking in Tuscany this month, learning about Italian food and a lot more than Italian food. The chef I’m working for draws her inspiration from around Europe, and especially from around the Mediterranean, and we’ve made a Tarta de Santiago on a couple of occasions to have a cake on the menu that’s “senza glutine”. It’s reminded me that I also have a recipe for this delicious Spanish cake from the region of Galicia, one named after it’s patron saint. It’s a recipe that I used to make with great regularity because of how simple and satisfying it is. There are no whipped egg whites here, no wheat flour replacements, no stabilizers or fancy techniques, not even butter; just almond flour and sugar and eggs and some flavorings. It’s traditionally topped with powdered sugar that gets dusted over a stencil of a cross. We’ve been doing it instead with a fig leaf as the stencil, which I’ve quite liked, though of course you can use any sort of design you’d like.